11.04.2010

I was asked to put together a Halloween photo booth for a trunk-or-treat after-party at our church this year. Being a fan of the photo booth movement, I was of course totally on board. I had grand plans for this but as the clocked ticked closer and closer to Halloween time seemed to melt away and the day of the trunk-or-treat arrived all too quickly. Using all of my available sheets for this ghost costume I was in need of a white back drop so I raced over to JoAnn's, the morning of, and managed to luck out with some great white vinyl home decor fabric on sale for $2.99 a yard! I gobbled up about 4 yards, grabbed a few sheets of black poster board and some wooden dowels and headed straight for the check out.

Upon arriving home, I got to work straight away. Jon helped me by finding some great font inspiration for the speech bubbles and called up a friend with photo backdrop equipment so that we could hang this thing. I quickly painted some spooky silhouettes in decorative frames, using both black craft acrylic paint and black tempera paint (the only kind of paint I had on hand for this). I then found an old rubber stamp and began stamping a wallpaper look behind the frames (with proper planning you could do this a lot better than I did and actually put the background pattern on before painting the frames...just a thought...)

It was hard to keep the Littles feet from dancing all over this but I somehow managed to get it finished just in the nick of time (just don't look too close!). Little A was delighted to see each scary creation come to life in the frames. His favorites were the googily eyed monster and Dracula (whom I was surprised to find him familiar with...)

While letting the backdrop dry I popped in Charlie Brown's - Great Pumpkin Halloween movie, to keep little feet from tromping all over everything, and I began work on the speech bubbles. I used some of Jon's font choices for "BOO!" and "EEK!" and just hand lettered the other titles. Little A was very excited to be able to read "EEK!" and "BOO!" so these speech bubbles naturally became his personal favorites.We made it to the trunk-or-treat a little late, pulling up just in time to see a portrait of a queen come to life and suddenly reach through her frame to deliver candy to the startled trunk-or-treaters (totally awesome). Jon took the littles around the parking lot for round one while I went on into the gym to set up the photo both. Phew! I somehow managed to put it together with enough time to do a second round of trunk-or-treating with the boys.

When it was time to close up trunk we all headed indoors for donuts, homemade root beer, pumpkin bowling, pin the mouth on the bat, Halloween fishing and of course costumed photo shoots. All in all I think it worked out...and can I just say...so glad to have this all ready for next year!

Do you know whether photo backdrop equipment is something that can be rented...? I'm planning my wedding for next June and would like to have a DIY photobooth too and this seems like it's be an easy way to be able to set one up!